News

Final stage of the Tour de Suisse shortened due to weather conditions

The final stage of the WorldTour race Tour de Suisse was shortened today due to extreme weather conditions.

The 117kilometre stage was reduced down to 57kilometres and featured just one of the two original mountain passes.

With the shorter distance, the stage provided for very fast and aggressive racing with Jarlinson Pantano (IAM Cycling) taking the stage victory.

Sam Bewley was the highest place finisher for ORICA-GreenEDGE on the stage wrapping up a solid nine day's of racing for the team.

Sport director Neil Stephens was happy with the overall team performance during the challenging nine-day race.

"The stage was shortened today because of the weather," explained Stephens. "It was still a hard fast stage with a mountain pass and cold conditions at the top. Magnus Cort was aggressive early on and got into an early move before the climb."

"The rest of the guys got through the day today with view of looking ahead to the races coming up.

"In general the whole tour panned out as we thought, the first few stages were pretty successful for us and the other stages we were a bit out of our league in the mountains, but overall a good solid week of racing from the guys."

How it happened:

The final stage of the tough nine-day Tour de Suisse saw harsh weather conditions force race organisers to shorten the 117kilometre stage to just 57kilometres.

The early climb, the Albulapass, was deemed too dangerous to race over with freezing, snowy temperatures at the top.

The race route was changed before the start and saw riders begin at the bottom of the Flüelapass, a 16kilometre climb peaking at 2383metres.

This made for incredibly short stage, never-the-less still a hard day for the general classification climbers to battle it out.

Cort relished the fast, aggressive racing and jump into a move along with Maximiliano Richeze (Etixx-Quickstep) and Jasper Stuyven (Trek-Segafredo) and the trio rode out to a 53second advantage going into the bottom of the Flüelapass.

Once the peloton reached the climb the trio were swallowed up and attacks came. With deteriorating conditions over the top of the climb the peloton, as expected, split to pieces with Moreno Lopez (Astana) summiting the climb 30seconds ahead of the rest.

A small group formed on the decent as Pantano went on to take the stage victory with Lopez sealing the overall classification for the 2016 edition of the WorldTour race.

At the wrap up of nine days of racing, ORICA-GreenEDGE finished with two podiums, after a successful start including a third place with Luke Durbridge in the prologue followed by a third on stage one with Michael Matthews, and a further two top-ten placings on stage four and eight with Cort and Matthews.